Ross + Kramer Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of paintings by Dominique Fung (previously interviewed here), curated by Ché Morales, titled Wash Your Corners on Friday, June 14th, 2019. Ten original paintings pair with an immersive installation project using light, color, and sound to intensify the spatial and fantastical elements of Fung's work.

“What is more European, after all, than to be corrupted by the Orient?”- Richard Howard

Let's start with the “Orient,” an artificial binary created to differentiate the Western world from the rest. As fabrication and fetishization, the term Orient has been used to "other" societies who inhabit Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East. Mystifying bodies and spaces in European art history and French Orientalist paintings that depict an East that never existed. Through painting Orientalizing tropes of period artifacts, Dominique Fung subverts the fantasies and dangers of the “Orient,” reclaiming the space once inhabited by false narratives as her own.

With aesthetics of indulgence and decadence, Fung's paintings evoke a world of genteel pleasure. Her use of exquisite colors are a delight, but uncanny surrealist ideologies underpin a subtle and subversive critique of history, culture, and contemporary life. Those creamy, sensual painted bodies, baths, fine china, ‘oriental' rugs, rose petals, slippers, knick-knacks, and cuisine coexist in a surreal multilayered pictorial.

Expanding on this imagined space is the collaborative installation that exists physically at Ross + Kramer Gallery. Curator Ché Morales worked closely with Dominique Fung to create an experience that invites the feel of a bathhouse. Colors and iconography directly inspired by the narratives in Fung's paintings provide an additional three-dimensional space that conjures thoughts while treading carefully across the bamboo floor. Cast sculptural elements and tiled walls enhance the fantasy created by projection and sound.

The work is an active investigation as it dismantles damaging fantasies and narratives encoded into Orientalist ideologies around the ideas of exoticism, eroticism, the ‘foreign body, the primitive, the feminine, the infantile, and the cosmetic. Each painting is an individual negotiation between the inside and out, the container and the contained. The objects that look out from the canvas are often more animated by spirit than the blank-eyed figures. They confront you. Who is doing the looking and who has the agency? Are you inside the body or are you the object? Or are you here for the spectacle?

"Wash Your Corners" is on view at Ross + Kramer June 14 - July 26, 2019.